I was sure why this was outside of the obvious permission denied, but my focus was on the filesystem size part of this error. Why was it taking so long to determine the filesystem size I thought?

Well, it does NOT have to do with the file system size of the device, but it on the first two words of the error. Permission denied. I solved this problem by not being an end user with no permissions to the system, I became a super user by executing su -. I then tried my command again:

Make File System ext3 on Device
mkfs -t ext3 /dev/xvdj

Success! The out was:

My lesson learned here was not to assume always that you have access to everything. You are not always a super user and you should never run as root in production.